College visit advise

Parents Forum
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<p>I agree - summer before Junior year is a good time for a few initial casual trips, associated with your summer travels. Try to do 2-3 schools that are a bit different. It’s a great way to discover what resonates.</p>

<p>I would recommend a tour and information session. Go on-line and find out the schedules. Often, even in the summer, the tour is led by a student, so you can get a feel for the campus culture by asking questions. Info sessions are good for Juniors to see, because most schools provide excellent information on what they are looking for and how to prepare. My son found this motivating.</p>

<p>I always liked to have an informal meal shortly after the visit so I could extract thoughts from my son. I wrote everything down, because, believe me, by Spring of senior year, you’ll be mixed up! “Which one of those schools had to pool table in the laundry room?”</p>

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<p>I see your point, but I don’t worry about motivation. He’s a valedictorian candidate as it is.</p>

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<p>I think that summer is great because the next summer is a good time to write essays. This is particularly true for kids who do many EC’s.</p>

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<p>I would echo what has been said about visiting before junior year. Stay close to home and visit the one to three hour drive schools. Lots can change between junior and senior year, and it’s good for them to get a feel of a LAC vs a large state school vs something in between. I know my son did not want to apply to any school that he hadn’t visited so we made a cross country trip in September of his senior year. This worked out well for him because he was taking all his classes at the local community college and their term hadn’t started yet so I thoroughly enjoyed visiting eight schools in seven days-- he ended up applying to three of them and attended one. However, my DD who is now a junior and has visited local schools and some distant ones on a few trips is not going to visit all of the schools she plans to apply to until after she gets acceptances. Each student is different, but let them lead you and you should be fine. It is truly an adventure!</p>

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<p>As a parent, here are my suggestions:</p>

<ol>
<li><p>Go to the website of each college your child wants to visit. Yes, they offer info sessions and student-guided tours, and usually you have to sign up in advance. </p></li>
<li><p>So you don’t have an overwhelming number of schools on your list, you can narrow it down by visiting virtual tour websites and reading student reviews of the schools. </p></li>
<li><p>If your child is having enough with the info sessions and is reaching burn-out, just go on the tours. But guided tours are important because the student guide helps an applicant picture himself at the school (or not), answers many questions, etc.</p></li>
<li><p>Spend time OBSERVING students at the school. Sit in the dining hall and listen to the kids. Go to the student union. Go to a performing arts event or sporting event. Be a keen observer. What do the kids wear, talk about, care about? Pick up a copy of the school newspaper. Sit in on a class. </p></li>
<li><p>Let your teen give his or her reactions before you offer your own impressions. Your kid is the one who has to be there ultimately!</p></li>
</ol>

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<p>My other piece of advice is to avoid just cherry picking as many parents tend to do with these visits. Few kids need to visit HPY to be convinced they need to be on their list. I know too many kids whose college tours were centered on the name schools and it was a nasty reality check when they began to realize that the chances of admissions to those schools was small.</p>

<p>I know one daughter and mom who are still smarting from making the above mistake. Daughter went on a tour of major cities visiting colleges, and because she was a good student with good test scores, she picked the most selective schools of the bunch. She didn’t get into any of them. Yes, she is at a great college, but after getting her chops set on the top names, it was really hard to get used to schools without the name recognition and “glow”. It really is the lesser known schools that need to be brought to the plate. Easy to pick the old familiar top drawer names. Picking a really good safety, match school is not so easy.</p>

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<p>Some addiitonal suggestions:</p>

<p>1) Challenge your assumptions. We took advantage of our visti to Amherst to also look at Hampshire and UMass. S was looking at smaller top tier LAC and this was a way to reassess (and ultimatley verify) the decision. For D it was Villanova, Bryn Mawr and Penn. She was looking at more rural schools and not Women’s Colleges. She will attend Bryn Mawr.</p>

<p>2) Try to eat in one of the dining halls - even if just a quick bite. It’s not so much the food, but to get a better sense of the students.</p>

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<p>The best thing my son liked was when the colleges set up lunch with students. Not the parents! </p>

<p>He sat in on a few classes but wasn’t impressed with the feel that gave him. We found that meeting with department professors was extremely helpful.</p>

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<p>I might disagree with the advice that tours are more important than info sessions. When we toured around with my older daughter we were amazed at how the personality and philosophy of the school became clear during the info session. Dartmouth believes in creating a citizen of the world and studying abroad is a very big deal, as is becoming fluent in at least one but preferably 2 or 3 languages. That’s when we discovered that Carnegie Mellon is really a trade school, an amazing trade school but still. We learned that Yale was a nurturing environment where they want to develop an “educated” student, knowledgeable in a variety of different areas. Yes, there were boring aspects to it and dumb questions asked by over zealous parents but mostly we got a good feel for the college. </p>

<p>The tours we found to be crowded and repetitive - how many books in the library, hours the various facilities are open, school ghost stories and traditions, etc. Often the only people who could really hear were the ones up front near the tour guide. I think a walk around campus with a good map after the info session might not be very interesting and all that’s needed, especially the first time around.</p>

<p>Definitely try to eat in some student dining facility and speak to current students if possible.</p>

<p>I also agree that you should try to meet and go on a tour in the department that your child is interested in. That was some of the most informative and important parts of our college visits.</p>

<p>I’m taking my GS troop to visit 3 relatively local colleges over Columbus Day weekend (within 2 hours of home). Not to replace the parents visits but to begin the process in a non-pressured way with their friends at schools they may or may not be interested in applying. We’ll sit in on the information session and then have a current student who graduated from our high school take the girls on a tour. I think that will be very interesting!</p>

<p>Finally, be certain to take a notebook with you so that your child (and you) can make notes right after the tour. All colleges will start to get muddled in everyone’s mind and first impressions, before they even share them with their friends, will be helpful down the road.</p>

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<p>“Is summer before junior year too early to start visiting colleges?” </p>

<p>No, I think it makes sense to start the process early. It is good to get a sampling and idea of desired attributes. Big vs small. City vs rural. etc. Including summer visits allows a bigger sampling. But yes, your student should revisit the top choices senior year when school is in session.</p>

<p>A friend was forced to criss-cross the country April of her daughter’s senior year because they had not seen any of the distant schools. That makes it tough. Better to just be in the position to revisit the one or two that are the top options at that point.</p>

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<p>I think it’s great to get a head start on visiting colleges, especially if your S has no idea what kind of college he’d be comfortable with. Since you’re going in the summer, when there aren’t students, your S can get an idea of whether he likes the location of the school (rural, urban, suburban), the size of the school (even without the students on campus, your S can get a sense of the size) and what’s offered (majors, big-time sports, greek life, etc.) Before junior year, he also has time to internalize the info presented at the admissions talk about how competitive the school is and get more motivated (someone besides mom or dad telling him the importance of standardized tests and GPA).</p>

<p>Don’t be discouraged if S doesn’t get excited at the beginning. We went to many colleges, starting sophomore year, before D started finding campuses she liked. Once she figured out what she liked in terms of size, location, etc, we were able to focus.</p>

<p>Another tip: if your S does particularly like any colleges, find out which admissions officer covers your geographic area. Doesn’t hurt for S to send a quick follow-up email expressing interested (and perhaps saying something specific about the school that he liked). Then, over time, update the admissions person <em>occasionally</em> on his interest. D did this at her top two choices - I like to think that, along with the rest of her package, this was just one more thing in her favor.</p>

<p>Since I live in the northeast and have occasion to go to other cities, like Boston, to visit family/friends, I will start taking my sophomore to see some schools. We will combine a school visit with our other reasons for being there. Easy way to find out right away if he likes a larger city school, like BU, or would be more comfortable with a smaller, not in the city school, like Brandeis or Tufts. Of course he can change his mind in two years, but there are kids who change their mind in March of senior year too!</p>

<p>Good luck and enjoy the college visits. The best part was the bonding time with D and me! We had a lot of fun in our travels!</p>

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<p>While location and size are a good focus and a way of narrowing down those types of colleges, I think it’s also important to figure out what your kids priorities are. After visiting a few schools, my rising Senior son has found that his #1 priority is the major. He has urban, suburban and rural colleges on his list and about their only commonality is that he likes the way they have the computer science/IS/IST major set up. To that end, we’ve been more diligent about going to open house events or trying to make contact with a Professor or student in that major. We’ve found that if we just go to an admissions talk and tour he still will still have no idea about his potential majors at that school. We’ve yet to have a tour with someone in his potential major and it’s quite frustrating to see buildings and classrooms with the important piece left blank.</p>

<p>Since we’ve been looking at a lot of OOS schools, we are not planning to go back to any colleges for second looks until after acceptance so Son needs to find out if it may work on that first visit. As good as it sounds to just look at colleges for their type, I think that’s best done close to home. At least that’s how it’s worked for us.</p>

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<p>Kathiep; You make excellent points, but for some students who have no idea of their major, they can’t take that approach. D was/is undecided, but she looked at colleges that had a variety of majors she migt be interested. My S is already more focused, so we will most likely do the visits as you suggested.</p>

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<p>As for summer before junior year: We visited a college that was close to a place where we were vacationing, just from the perspective of “let’s see what a tour is like / what it’s all about” and wound up being favorably impressed (it’s now on D’s list, as more of a likely / safety). It helped my kids see what the process was all about and start thinking about things they might like or might not like, such as campus size, access to nature, rural vs urban, etc. </p>

<p>We then took advantage of 3 day weekends and spring break during junior year to do our big trips. So we’re sitting here at the end of junior year with basically the majority of our visits done. There are a few schools we won’t be able to get to, but we now have enough under our belts (about 16 schools) that they can make pretty informed judgments about the others.</p>

<p>My big piece of advice (which came from H): Do the tour / info session, walk around and grab a bite to eat, etc., then get back in the car and SAY NOTHING. Let the kid talk about what he liked / didn’t. My natural inclination was to jump in and give my opinion, and I found it best when I didn’t.</p>

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<p>“my rising Senior son has found that his #1 priority is the major. He has urban, suburban and rural colleges on his list and about their only commonality is that he likes the way they have the computer science/IS/IST major set up.” - That happens a lot. College selection includes a bunch of trade-offs. The important thing to learn in that case is that the kid does not hate certain parameters (such as cities or tiny schools). </p>

<p>“As good as it sounds to just look at colleges for their type, I think that’s best done close to home.”
Yep, close to home works. But it also works to weave it in with any vacations or family visits. (We particulariy liked areas in vincinity of family - that makes the idea of long distance college selection more comfortable.)</p>

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<p>I agree with the posters that summer before Junior year is a good time for some visits. Gets your kid motivated for junior year. Also, you really are best off if you already know where you want to apply by early fall of Senior year, so it isn’t really that far away. That gives you time to make sure all the tests you need are taken (esp. those pesky SAT subject tests, scheduling can be a huge headache!). And if he applying ED or EA, he is ready to start that process in the fall.</p>

<p>One suggestion I have is to take good notes about each campus you visit. They do blur together over the months and months of visiting and evaluating. And those notes help A TON when you are writing the “Why college X?” essay in fall of Senior year! We actually made up a list of questions to consider about each campus (our list ended up with maybe 40 question on it), and took notes while we walked around. Just made a copy of the questions for each campus so we had a blank sheet each time.</p>

<p>I also agree with those who say it is good to do more than just do the tour. Info sessions are sometimes helpful. We usually tried to eat in the cafeteria, and D met with coaches and professors on many campuses. That definitely takes coordination ahead of time! More selective colleges do have their tours fill up, so I would contact every college ahead of time (well ahead) to get on the list. This all requires tracking (spreadsheets are good!). </p>

<p>Regarding interviews, if you can go back for those, there is something to be said for waiting until later (summer Sr. year, or early fall) if the campuses are convenient for you… your son will be more mature, and better at the interview. Especially at his top choice schools.</p>

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<p>I got a small spiral notebook, that I could slip into my purse, and I only used it for college tours and info sessions. I took notes, and then after, as S2 talked, I took more notes. That way all the information was in one place. This turned out to be very useful for the applications, esp. “why college x?” essays. It was also useful during the time he was making his final choices. I was able to remind him about some of the impressions he has on campus.</p>